Virtual disaster recovery to Azure Cloud
The Recovery Console lets you keep warm standby virtual images up-to-date in the Azure cloud. There is no Azure recovery target, but you can accomplish the task by installing the Recovery Console on a virtual machine in the Azure cloud and enabling the disaster recovery of your production systems into Hyper-V.
Please note: these steps are correct at the time of writing. However, Microsoft may change their process at any time, meaning these steps may become out of date.
Step 1: Create VM in Azure
- Go to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com and sign in with your Microsoft account. You will need to create an account if you don't have one yet
- Create an Azure subscription. If you do not have a suitable subscription yet afree 30-day trial is available
- From the left menu, select Virtual machines
- Then click Add and follow a setup wizard
- Set the operating system to Windows Server 2016 Datacenter or Windows 10 Pro (they both support nested virtualization)
- For faster data transfer, select a location that is close to where the backup data is located
- Choose a VM size that supports nested virtualization: Dv3 or Ev3
For the full list of supported VM sizes, see this Microsoft article: Azure compute unit (ACU).
The following settings must be configured:
For further details, see the following Microsoft instruction: Create virtual machine
Step 2: Enable Hyper-V role
- From the left menu, select Virtual machines
- Start the virtual machine you created in Step 1
- Establish a remote connection to the virtual machine (view Microsoft instructions)
- Enable the Hyper-V role on the virtual machine (view Microsoft instructions)
Step 3: Enable virtual disaster recovery
- Visit the Downloads page and download the Recovery Console installer
- Run the installer and complete the installation
- Enable Virtual Disaster Recovery to Hyper-V, being sure to meet all requirements before beginning for as many devices as necessary
Helpful settings:
- Keep the LocalSpeedVault disabled in this configuration since the recovery is "Cloud to Cloud"
- Location - this is where virtual machines will be created. You can use any path here, but typically it is
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machine
Unless you uncheck the Continuous Restore setting, the restore will begin momentarily and will update the image with the changes every time a backup occurs for this system.